Assange’s plea deal sets a chilling precedent, but it could have been worse
The plea deal that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has reached with prosecutors is bad for American press freedoms. But the outcome also could have been worse.
The deal is an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has jeopardized the ability of journalists to report on military, intelligence or diplomatic information that officials deem secret. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the role of a free press in bringing to light information beyond what those in power approve for release is a foundational principle of American self-government.
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The agreement means that for the first time in American history, gathering and publishing information the government considers secret has been successfully treated as a crime. This new precedent will send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may be chilled in how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.
The charges centered on the publications that vaulted him to global notoriety and made him a hero to the anti-war left: a video of a U.S. helicopter gunning down people in Baghdad, including a Reuters photographer; troves of military incident logs documenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; a quarter-million diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world; and dossiers about Guantánamo detainees.
No one had ever been charged under the Espionage Act for a journalistic act, in part because there had long been a widespread assumption that applying that law to such acts would be unconstitutional.
The charge against Assange, then, crossed a line. It showed that the 21st-century crackdown on leakers could expand to encompass criminalizing the same sort of actions that brought to light important post-9/11 abuses, including warrantless wiretapping and torture, as well as day-to-day journalism about military, intelligence or diplomatic matters that help people better understand the world.
The government has still made an example of Assange in a way that may well lead some national security journalists to leave some important stories unreported out of fear of facing similar prosecution.
